Short Takes

Call it politics, or call it paranoia, but J. Edgar Hoover had files on more than 20,000 Americans, including a lot of Jews. Eve Sicular, a klezmer musician in New York, knew that there was an FBI file on her grandmother, Adele Sicular, but she didn’t know what it contained. “It was like a time capsule,” Sicular said of the file, when she finally got it declassified in 2003. “It showed an accomplished, forceful, determined woman.”

It’s the talk of the Jew-ternet: Downton Abbey has an honest-to-goodness Jewish character. And he’s not just passing through: He’s dating Lady Rose and seems to be in season five for the long haul.

There’s more. The PBS import series doesn’t portray him as a caricature, a diamond dealer or bookkeeper or clothing store mogul. Yes, his parents are rich bankers. But they’ve also British aristocracy. Also, he’s a mensch; he met the free-spirited Rose in episode five, which aired on Sunday, when he offers to help her carry some baskets.

For years, Rena Margulies Chernoff of Brooklyn traveled to Boston on Jan. 27. She and a cousin who also survived Auschwitz — they posed as twins — would celebrate the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz as their personal day of rebirth.

This is a busman’s holiday for Ziggy Gruber. The round-faced restaurateur from Houston (Texas, not Street), is sitting in Ben’s Kosher Delicatessen Restaurant, an enormous and bustling kosher deli near Times Square, talking Jewish food and chatting about his movie debut in the new documentary film “Deli Man.”

Outside the Moriah Synagogue in the central Israeli city of Petach Tikvah, boys in ritual fringes and girls in long skirts handed out fliers for the dozens of candidates running in the Jan. 14 primary for the Jewish Home party, a right-wing, Modern Orthodox faction. Religious voters trickled in and out of polls in the synagogue lobby.